A bit more information for your mental model: Afaik, reddit has a pretty stable upvote vs downvote ratio, like 7:1. (Sorry, no source, but I remember the reddi

A bit more information for your mental model: Afaik, reddit has a pretty stable upvote vs downvote ratio, like 7:1. (Sorry, no source, but I remember the reddit founder saying it in an interview). And in your calculations you assumed that every post receives the same number of votes. Also that is not true, because of ranking. Higher ranking posts get more views, more votes, more views and so on. In this case the upvote-downvote difference is different for two posts with different popularity, but same upvote:downvote ratio.